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A really old game called Fat Princess - it was a wonderful multiplayer real time strategy kind of thing, with a beautiful community for quite a few years. Despite the name, it was one of the best games I've ever played!
If you were on there and recognise my screen name, yes it is me!
Comix Zone. It was a beat-em-up on the Sega Genesis with a gorgeous, comic book art style. It wasn't the greatest game, but it had character and it stood out against some of the other fighting games at the time. I'd really love a remake or sequel at some point. Doing it in the style of the Spider-verse movies would be rad.
Rune factory 3. It’s not popular anymore, nor do I see it talked about but I still play it from time to time. Sometimes I leave it open just to listen to the music/background and sometimes I fire up youtube and my speaker just to listen to its OST.
Mindustry. Played it on and off for years, abosultely love the game. Way too good consider the fact that it's free, and when I picked it up I expected to get a couple of hours of fun out of it. But at this point it has lasted years. And with the occasional update, I think it will last even longer.
The FATE series. No, not the anime, the Diablo ripoff computer game with stolen music sold by WildTangent. I was a kid that got by playing only demos, and this game was one I reinstalled over and over again to get those free plays.
It's a pretty simple dungeon crawling game with procedurally generated floors where you have to get to floor 5x and defeat the named boss there so you can reincarnate and start it over again.
I reinstall it every couple of years to play it. It's got hardly any story, quests are generated for the floors you're about to reach, stats are randomly generated. It's just pure gameplay, though a bit repetitive as it can be. I love that it has a similar fish mechanic to Torchlight for your pets.
I remember seeing a nostalgia post on the game on Reddit and the developer of the game series had commented on the post. It was like meeting one of your heroes. Definitely very memorable for me.
The third game supposedly has all the content from the first two, so here's the steam link if anyone's curious.
Ogre Battle, either March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Caliber. It's such a weird cul-de-sac of tactical RPGs. The same company made Tactics Ogre, which then became Final Fantasy Tactics, which in turn inspired a zillion other post-2000 tactics games; and Tactics Ogre got a remake version recently. But the Ogre Battle side of the family just disappeared.
Shadowrun for the Genesis, I never hear anyone mention it and it was a great game. I've played it recently and it still holds up. EDIT: I'm adding a Sierra PC game called Shivers, it was kinda like horror Myst. I loved it so much and no one ever mentions like it was never released.
Power Blade on the NES. You are a Schwarzenegger-in-his-prime-like character in the future fighting the robotic underlings of an AI gone rogue. It has only 7 levels or so, but it has a nice gameplay to it, and the music was composed by Kinuyo Yamashita, who also did the Castlevania music. Needless to say, the soundtrack is top notch.
The Banner Saga, beautiful hand drawn rotoscoped visuals and animation, great characters, strong story and lore. Gameplay is turn based strategy, and it’s very addicting. Absolutely fantastic music. Never hear anyone talking about it.
Not much nostalgia for Jet Force Gemini, a Rare third person shooter where you adventure through missions, each having secret routes to find using guns/keys you slowly unlock. The game had a bit too much completionist vibe to get to finish it, but was exciting as a kid.
On the 3DS, I also liked Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D. Basically RE’s best arena mode expanded out with perks on a game you could play mobile, and online. I still hope to see more of that type of experience.
Solar Jetman for the NES. A really unique game that was well ahead of it's time, featuring exploration, problem solving, cut-scenes, great music, and multiple planets to explore with different gravities. Your mission is to repair your spacecraft by finding missing parts, and you can use a small craft or leave the vehicle and boost around with a jetpack with your spacesuit.
Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future on Dreamcast
CrossCode. It's an SNES-style action RPG with very fun combat, 2D-Zelda-like puzzles, and a genuinely charming well-written story that was made in HTML5 and JavaScript for some reason. It is genuinely my favorite game of all time. I habitually proselyte this game to friends, but check it out for the love of God
Kenka Bancho. It's a series of japanese games for the PSP, with only the 3rd game being officially translated and released outside Japan as Kenka Bancho Badass Rumble. It's like playing a typical shonen anime set in high school, you're a delinquent who fights everyone from the other schools in order to become the ultimate badass. It's semi open world and you can beat pedestrians and innocent civilians, which reduce your badass meter, because real badasses only fight people who can fight back! And with their bare hands, weapons are for weak pussies! It's over the top and fun as hell. I've only ever met one other person mention that game, and it was an RPG friend of mine, when he bought a PSP for himself.
Something I highly recommend for anyone that enjoyed River City Ransom or similar beat'em ups.
Just for your information, there are actually two other games related to Rocket Slime. Unfortunately they are JP only. The one that release outside of Japan is the 2nd game. There's a GBA game that came out before it and a sequel to the DS game focused on pirate ships
Alter Ego, a 1986 DOS game that's still one of the best life-sim type games ever made. You start out as a baby and work your way through life by making choices. They can lead to a wide variety of outcomes, including dying tragically as a child, etc... You can play it free online or they've made updated versions.
I really liked Rumble Roses back on PS2
Women's Wrestling with good graphics and interesting features.
Awesomenauts. The coolest 2D platforming MOBA. The gameplay is super fun and has a surprising amount of depth. Unfortunetly the devs have almost abandoned it and the playerbase is small (still active tho) but it's still one of my favorite games ever.
I really loved rocket slime as well. There's a spiritual successor called connectank on steam that gives me the same vibes, and has fun co-op!
Mine is Dark Cloud. It was a PS2 launch title (or near enough to it) that was sort of a PlayStation answer to the Zelda franchise. Along with the original Spyro trilogy, Dark Cloud was by far my most-played game back in the day. It had an absolute banger of a soundtrack and a few pieces of really interesting unique gameplay including an RPG element where the primary progression system was not in your characters, but in upgrading your weapons, and a city-builder where you have to place all the people in each village near or away from various other elements in the village to meet their needs.
I almost never hear anyone talking about Dark Cloud, but extremely randomly one of the like four Twitch streamers I actually watch (all of whom are Age of Empires streamers, because that's basically all I watch these days) happens to play its soundtrack frequently on her stream as background music. So that's been really fun.
Loco-Roco for the PSP. As a game developer, I consider this to be the pinnacle of game development. It is completely original, uses only two buttons, super intuitive, yet your drawn into it and want to play for hours. It makes me sad that few have heard of it.
Toy Story on the sega genesis (and snes) is a close second. It is actually a bit of a hot mess, each level is a completely different style of gameplay. But it is super rewarding to fight your way through to the end. And it showcases so many different styles of gameplay.
Alundra. It's basically the PS1's own Zelda title, with a bit of Terranigma DNA mixed in. I played it as a kid and remember being blown away by the plot, and unlike a lot of other games I played back then, this one mostly held up when I replayed it as an adult.
I'm going to name a few potentially obscure ones from my 30 years of gaming
Micro Machines 2 (SNES and Mega Drive) - as far as I am aware, only MM1 had wide release, the rest were PAL only but have modern 60hz and NTSC patches now. Great fun, and you can play as Violet Berlin (for those like me who used to watch Bad Influence!)
Looney Toons Collector: Martian Alert!! (Game Boy Color) - this one is hard to categorise! Its a top down adventure RPG like Zelda, you start as Bugs and recruit further characters each with their own skills to traverse the world and solve puzzles. For example, Elmer Fudd has a gun, Tweety can fly over gaps, etc. It is actually really fucking good, and holds up better than many GBC games. You can also trade with other people who have the game, and there's a sequel I haven't even played yet!
Wario Land Virtual Boy - this is without a doubt one of the best platformers ever made, and it's a damn shame it's been forgotten by most. HOWEVER! Emulators exist, and the game runs like a dream in retroarch/mednafen.
A few tips: the virtual boy is a 50hz console, so set your display to that or use gsync otherwise you'll have stuttering. The console is also natively a wide-screen display, which is sweet. Steam Deck is perfect for it, and looks great in black and white. If you have a VR headset, that's a good idea too to get the proper 3D experience, but it's not essential in any way whatsoever.
And lastly, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch) - I don't care if it's the opposite of unknown,, I'm recommending this one. Culmination of the best trilogy I've ever known in gaming, and by far the best game I've ever played. With the 4k, 60fps and rebalance mods when playing on PC it's simply incredible. Based Monolithsoft.
The soundtrack is mind-blowing, has the best battle themes in the series and you can tell just how much work went into it (main two characters have flutes they use in the story to send dead soldiers to the afterlife - Yasunori Mitsuda then made those flutes for real to be used in the soundtrack). Just, every single thing about the game exudes more love and care than most games I've played and it shows. After so many years of being unable to finish a story due to corporate wankery (xenosaga....), Takahashi finally got to make his masterpiece. And for those who were put off by the anime-ness of Xenoblade 2, 3 is very much reined in, adult and pretty fucking dark. No big anime titties here - it's war, and it's not pleasant. It's more like XB1 - 2 is the outlier, and its happy-go-lucky feeling makes far more sense after seeing what happens in 3.
There used to be a game I found when shareware was still a thing. It was called Harry the Handsome Executive. You basically scoot around on a chair in an office throwing pencils and avoiding traps, it was cute
Archon, it's a chess game with monsters instead of typical pieces, and they fight when you take a space. I played it on a Commodore 64.
I miss the savage series. Probably no chance of those coming back though.
Micro machines was beautiful. The closest I've got to reliving the pure mayhem was probably Mashed (I think) for Xbox.
How many people talk about pac man world 2? That game still holds up and it's one of the few gamecube discs that is still in a great condition after all of these years.
Gunz: the duel
Its a fast paced 3rd person shooter.
There were a lot of unique glitches you could manipulate for advanced movement. This inadvertently made the skill floor and ceiling very high.
The game was super fast paced and played like nothing I will ever play again.